5 Ways to Turn Social Media Interactions Into Actionable Sales Leads

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Indrajeet is a Marketing professional with 6+ years of experience in managing different facets of Digital Marketing. After working with SpiderG - a Pune based SaaS startup, he is now ready to work as a freelance marketer with different SaaS startups helping them with marketing strategy, plan and execution. His love for old-school hard rock and metal music culminated in taking up guitar and starting www.guitargabble.com.

He’s studying Stoic philosophy, experimenting with productive habits and documenting the progress. Get in touch if you’re keen to know how you can implement pro-wrestling tactics in your marketing, community building and storytelling.

You understand the importance of social media in building a solid reputation for your brand. You have crafted a social media strategy that you judiciously stick to. You’ve invested time and resources in posting content on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and other social platforms, and have been successful in building a community of followers who regularly interact with you.

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Now, you may be looking to monetize your community. How can you generate leads from your social media followers that can drive sales?

In this article, we will look at 5 ways in which you can bring in prospects from you social media interactions.

Listen and Respond

Sounds easy, yet very few businesses understand the importance of it. Posting several times a week without engaging with your community will not yield much. You need to be an active participant in the online discussions. The promptness in addressing the customer queries and complaints will enhance the customer experience, otherwise the follower count is just a vanity metric.

According to Jay Baer, among people who used social media to contact customer support, 32% expect a response within 30 minutes and 42% expect a response in 60 minutes. Apart from responding to complaints, be open to feedback as well! To give you a perspective, according to Convince and Convert, responding to a social media complaint can increase customer advocacy by upto 25%.

Help People Solve Their Problems

Social media is a two-way street. In addition to addressing your customers’ queries, be open to helping people solve their problems. Whenever someone asks a question pertaining to your industry, help them by offering advice or conveying how your company can solve their problems. For this, you can set up a stream consisting of relevant hashtags and keyword phrases in tools like HootSuite or Mention.

Helping your community is a quick way to engage potential leads, build trust, and who knows, you might get a customer right away!

Engage with Influencers

Involving influencers in your social media efforts allows you to reach to a wider audience. Collaborating with influencers works because they tend to have a specific content strategy that resonates with their audience (and yours as well), and they have high levels of engagement. When you work with influencers, you tap into their set of followers who are more than willing to buy stuff recommended by their favorite celebrity. According to a study by Experticity, 82% of consumers would prefer a recommendation made by a micro-influencer.

Run Lead Generation Ads on Social Media

Every once in a while, we get to read an article on how organic reach is dead, paid ad is the way to go, and so on. And there’s a truth to it up to a certain extent. If you want to know a sure-fire way to convert your interactions into leads, lead generation ad is what you should be looking at. The top 3 social media platforms (Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn) have the feature of lead generation ads that can straightaway bring in MOFU (Middle of the funnel) or BOFU (Bottom of the funnel) sales-ready leads, depending on your ad content and targeting.

If you are running ads on Facebook, you can up the ante by building Engagement Custom Audience, which lets you target the set of audience that has engaged with your content on Facebook. This further enhances the chances of bringing in leads for your business.

Post Gated Content

To get people engage with you and talk about you, your content needs to be interesting. Take time to understand the pressing needs of your audience, and develop a downloadable gated content piece that addresses those needs. Develop social media posts that lead to a landing page where followers can fill out the information to download the content, and this will get you sales leads.

You can also run webinars, contests and give out exclusive offers or free trials to your followers to get more leads. These tactics are proven to generate engagement and leads that are more prone to becoming your customers.

Final Thoughts

Whenever marketers think of generating leads, they mostly think of email marketing. Don’t be that marketer. Focus on building a brand that lends an empathetic ear to their audience. Of course, this activity is a marathon, not a sprint. When used correctly, social media is a big platform to generate and nurture leads.